#EQ POLAR BEAR SKIN PATCH#
#EQ POLAR BEAR SKIN FULL#

A chill percolated into my throat, and I could feel a shiver starting to twitch in my jaw.

'One Mississippi, two MississippiвЂ¦' The water felt textured, like cut glass, and wet frost gripped my feet and legs like Velcro. 'You have to stay in a minute to get any effect.'

#EQ POLAR BEAR SKIN PATCH#

It did not take long to establish that it was as unpleasant as it looked, and I started back to the patch of lakeside beach. Nevertheless, I removed my shoes and walked in to my knees. 'It's not as if you'll get an opportunity like this again.' Pugh, whose nickname is Ice Bear, estimated it was 35 degrees. On my visit, ice chips glinted on the surface of Nigardsbreen. In addition to gelid waters, Pugh has had to worry about sharks, polar bears and leopard seals. That's all you can wear for a swim to count according to Channel Swimming Association regulations, and Pugh, a 37-year-old maritime lawyer, bided by those rules on swims in the Antarctic, around the frosty perimeter of South Africa's Cape Peninsula, and along Norway's 127-mile-long Sognefjord. Pugh picked me up at the Jostedal Hotel, and we drove ten minutes to Nigardsbreen, a jade-colored lake in front of a glacier wedged between the mountains.ДЄt the water's edge, he stripped down to the Speedo-goggles-cap uniform. The region, Jostedal, is lightly populated with farmsteads and meadows in front of roaring waterfalls and snowcapped peaks, landscape features that are so commonplace here that there is nowhere on the single main road designated a scenic overlook. He had rented a house with a turf roof sprouting purple flowers in a bucolic valley running down to a glacier. We had met a month before in western Norway, where I'd gone to watch Pugh prepare for his expedition. 'Scientists are predicting that air temperatures in the Arctic will increase dramatically over the next 50 years or so,' he continued. 'Five years ago, after all, it would not have been possible to swim at the North Pole. He wanted a picture, he had told me, that would 'shock the world' out of its complacency about global warming. He felt as if his entire body was on fire.

#EQ POLAR BEAR SKIN FULL#

The water, he said, was full of sounds, a violent creaking of shifting ice. You get that sense of nothingness, of absolutely nothing underneath you.' It's like diving into a dark black nothingness. 'It was the most frightening thing I could imagine,' he told me. The water temperature was 28.7 degrees Fahrenheit, and Pugh, the world's premier cold-water endurance swimmer, swam for a kilometer (.62 of a mile) wearing only a Speedo, a cap and goggles.

Eq polar bear skin